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The New York Times published a story about a young Kodak engineer's development of the first practical digital camera:
Imagine a world where photography is a slow process that is impossible to master without years of study or apprenticeship. A world without iPhones or Instagram, where one company reigned supreme. Such a world existed in 1973, when Steven Sasson, a young engineer, went to work for Eastman Kodak.
Two years later he invented digital photography and made the first digital camera.
Mr. Sasson, all of 24 years old, invented the process that allows us to make photos with our phones, send images around the world in seconds and share them with millions of people. The same process completely disrupted the industry that was dominated by his Rochester employer and set off a decade of complaints by professional photographers fretting over the ruination of their profession.
The camera he created looked rather odd (there is a picture in the article):
The final result was a Rube Goldberg device with a lens scavenged from a used Super-8 movie camera; a portable digital cassette recorder; 16 nickel cadmium batteries; an analog/digital converter; and several dozen circuits — all wired together on half a dozen circuit boards.
The article points out that Kodak owned the patent for the digital camera and made a fortune from it until it expired in 2007. Three years later Kodak itself expired, filing bankruptcy because it failed to properly utilize the technology it invented.
It may be an error to say that Mr. Sasson invented digital photography. Wasn't NASA doing it with its Mariner and Pioneer space probes?
(Score: 2, Disagree) by Bot on Thursday August 13 2015, @12:41PM
Yes, digital cameras, cellphones, smartphones, should not be called inventions but something like "discoveries". Someone is bound to do it. Inventions create something that could well not exist at all forever.
A db is a discovery, visicalc is an invention. Gran Turismo is a discovery, Tetris is an invention.
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(Score: 3, Interesting) by mcgrew on Thursday August 13 2015, @01:39PM
The first database was indeed an invention. It didn't just evolve; someone had an idea and built from that. Your argument might apply to the television, which came from a series of inventions starting in the late nineteenth century, starting with the fax machine.
In his Fifty Years from Now (online in a couple of days), Hugo Gernsback wrote in 1926:
Movies by radio! Why not? You will be able to have a moving picture produced in some central plant and projected in your home, on your yacht, or on your camping trip, the picture being sent by radio, and received and projected upon your screen. All this is perfectly possible.
It wasn't practical for two more decades.
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(Score: 2) by FatPhil on Monday August 17 2015, @10:43AM
For true invention, I think you need to hunt out cases of where those who should be familiar with the field are unable to distinguish the new thing from magic.
Great minds discuss ideas; average minds discuss events; small minds discuss people; the smallest discuss themselves
(Score: 2) by Bot on Tuesday August 18 2015, @06:45PM
> It wasn't practical for two more decades.
Streaming to the yacht is still not practical, especially when you don't own one.
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(Score: 2) by mcgrew on Thursday August 20 2015, @12:20PM
Over the air TV (not internet) has been on yachts for decades. And no, I don't have one either.
mcgrewbooks.com mcgrew.info nooze.org